1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to information processing systems. More specifically, embodiments of the invention provide a system and method for correlating sequences of instructions.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a CPU reports performance issues (e.g., cache misses, pipeline stalls, etc.) it does so against a specific address in memory. Performance engineers analyze sequences of instruction(s) proximate to the highlighted address(es) and attempt to determine optimal code choices to improve performance.
Currently, the performance analysis process is manual with the performance engineer looking at the highlighted address and surrounding code to determine the nature of the performance issue. It would be desirable, however, to automate the process of correlating “instruction sequences” from multiple locations and overlaying this data with the performance data provided by profiling tools. This automation would require a software component that searches through all instruction sequences for which there is performance data and locate substantially similar subsequences or subsequence “patterns” of code for further analysis.